How to change limiting beliefs - A comparison between IFS and CBT

In this article, I am going to describe how IFS works with clients to change limiting beliefs that no longer serve a purpose in life, and how it is different from CBT.

What are beliefs from an IFS perspective?

Beliefs are a fixed set of ideas, emotions and body sensations that we consider to be true without questioning them. Beliefs are what we anticipate will happen if we do certain things. We have thousands of beliefs, and they help us live life without having to learn everything we know all over again.

Beliefs are the result of learning processes. For example, once we learn how to drive a car, we have a set of ready-made beliefs that help us drive efficiently. We have the belief that, by pressing our foot on the break, the car will slow down, or the belief that, once we turn the key, the engine will switch on. Beliefs create automatic behaviours that we use without having to learn anything new and without testing its validity. In a way, the majority of what we think we “know” is a belief.

If we consider beliefs the result of a learning process, all parts of ourself involved in learning something will end up holding beliefs related to that learning experience. The parts that are most receptive to learning are managers, but also exiles and firefighters learn and create beliefs through all the experiences we go through.

Consider, for example, all the things we learn when going to school. We not only learn subject knowledge, but also social skills spanning from friendship to romance and sexuality. All the learning we do crystallises in sets of beliefs that we rely on every time a new situation is close enough to something we have been through already. We hold beliefs on everything we do. For psychotherapy purposes, the main areas of interest are beliefs about

• relationships

• success/failure

• sexuality

• gender

• race

• health

• being bad/good

• identity and self-image

• spirituality and religion

The most common, and often painful and distorted, beliefs we have are about what others think of us. For example the belief “Others do not like me”.

How IFS and CBT shift beliefs held by protectors

Protectors, in IFS, include all parts that have a protective function in our system. They therefore hold beliefs to help them carry out their job efficiently.

Healthy managers hold beliefs that help navigate reality and daily interactions. For example, they hold cultural biases, figures of speech and any information needed to function socially in an acceptable way. It could be argued that people on the autistic spectrum do not have managers that hold these beliefs, and therefore cannot make sense of social interactions.

For example, a manager’s belief might be that, if someone has recently lost a person close to them, they are mourning. This is very true for modern cultures, but it was not always the same. There are cultures who respond to death in very different ways, which means that the connection of loss with grief, is an assumption, and, therefore a belief.

Managers are very skilled at picking up “acceptable ways of behaving” that are either explicit or implicit. For instance, when we start working at a new place, our managers do a brilliant job at understanding what the values and the behaviours of the work environment are. It might take a while, but we soon realise, for example, what time it is allowed to leave the office, what happens if we are late, and many more aspects of work life.

If managers are burdened (usually because they are trying to protect exiles), beliefs tend to be rigid and, often, dysfunctional and distorted.

• Belief Distortion refers to the fact that these beliefs were created at the time in which the manager started to do its job. For example, in case of bullying at school because of wearing out-of-fashion glasses, the manager’s belief will be “If I wear out of fashion glasses, I will be bullied”;

• Belief dysfunction refers to the fact that these beliefs, despite having a reason to exist in the past, they are no longer functional in the present (in which adults do not hold much judgement around glasses);

• Belief rigidity means that these beliefs do not change, adjust or adapt in presence of new data.

There is a well-known phenomenon called “Confirmation bias” that describes how we tend to select data and evidence that supports our beliefs, and we tend to discard as unreliable what goes against our beliefs.

IFS offers an elegant way of dealing with rigidity, distortion and dysfunction of beliefs because it teaches us to enter into a compassionate relationship with these managers and understand their stories and their reasons for being so rigid.

The IFS approach differs clearly from the CBT model of dealing with beliefs. While CBT uses cognitive challenge, IFS uses what Disk Schwartz calls “compassionate challenge”.

CBT challenges distorted beliefs head on by

• telling clients that these beliefs are not true,

• gathering counter-evidence

• stating new beliefs

This approach might work with relatively unburdened protectors, and, with enough will power, the new belief might remain in place.

IFS offers a “compassionate challenge” by

• offering acceptance and gratitude to the manager;

• establishing a trustworthy and compassionate connection to the manager;

• gathering understanding of where the belief is coming from;

• appreciating the positive intention of the manager, who is choosing to keep that belief in place;

• seeking permission from the manager to introduce change;

• putting the manager in charge of the change;

• asking the manager what if there are other parts involved (usually exiles or polarised parts) that need to be involved in the change process.

When all the elements of the IFS model are followed, change happens effortlessly because it takes place at the pace and at the will of the parts involved. Therefore there is no need for will power or for any form of challenge. The IFS model wants to liberate and unburden the system using the natural tendency to heal.

Shifting beliefs held by exiles

While protectors mainly hold beliefs about how to world functions and about how to behave, exiles hold belief around identity. These are the deepest beliefs we hold as they are form very early is the development of our system.

It is easy to appreciate how different life is if a person holds the belief of being worthy of love and respect, or if the belief is, instead, of being unworthy of any care and compassion.

Beliefs held at exile level stem directly from traumatic experiences and, therefore, needs to be treated with much care and in the context of trauma therapy that is not limited to shifting beliefs. I will not write anything else about these beliefs on this article, and I want to make it clear that it is important to use caution and respect when dealing with exiles.

One final note…

I hope this article has given you some insight into the IFS method. I personally write these articles and they are freely available on my website. I kindly ask that you reference them by quoting this webpage if you use them for personal, professional or educational purposes.

If there are topics you would like to know more about, please let me know.